CP 03862/en
Marcel Proust to Daniel Halévy [Saturday evening, 19 July 1919]
(Click on the link above to see this letter and its notes in the Corr-Proust digital edition, including all relevant hyperlinks.)
My dear Daniel
When for so long I have had some very helpful things to write to you (it requires being in a state close to death for me to have not yet written to you all that I think about your admirable novel[2], so that the booklet you were so kind to lend me[3] is still next to my bed, not being able to find the first editions of my books that I have been searching for in vain for a few weeks (the editions hoarded by an unknown bookstore), and I am still not resigned to send you the more ordinary editions but which at least allow you to read my work if you would like) I must tell you this evening how much I disapprove of your manifesto in Le Figaro[4]. Disapproval of a manifesto, is an even greater vanity than the manifesto itself. The positive excuse for this is that it responds, you say, to another “bolshevist” manifesto[5]. I have not read the first, I do not know where one can find it and I do not doubt that it is not absurd.
But even if I were less tired, how many other absurdities I could point out in the Figaro manifesto. No fair minded person would deny that by denationalising a work one makes it lose its value, and that it is at the very height of the particular that the general blossoms. But, is it not a truth of the same order, that one removes their general value and even national value to a body of work by seeking to nationalise it. The mysterious laws presiding over the blooming of the aesthetic truth as well as the scientific truth are falsified, if a foreign reasoning intervenes at the beginning. The expert who gives the greatest honour to France by bringing the laws to light, would cease giving honour if he searched for it and not for the only truth and he would no longer find this unique correspondence which is what a law is. I am embarrassed to say such simple things but I cannot understand how a mind like yours seems not to take this into consideration. That France must watch over the literatures of the whole world is a mandate that we would cry with joy to learn that has been entrusted to us, but that is a bit shocking to see us taking this upon ourselves. This “hegemony”, born of the “Victory”[6], makes one think involuntarily about “Deutschland über alles”[7] and because of this, it is slightly unpleaseant. The character of “our race”[8] (is it good french, to speak of a “French” “race”?) was to know how to combine such pride with even more modesty.
No one admires the Church more than I do, but to take the counter view to Homais, so far as to say that it has been the guardianship of the progress of the human spirit, at all times, is a bit strong[9]. It is true that there are “non-believing” catholics. But those “non-believers” who I suppose are led by Maurras, did not bring great support for French Justice at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. Regarding other countries, why choose such a cutting tone when discussing such disciplines like the arts where one can only prevail through persuasion. On many occasions, you say “we are listening” (meaning “we demand without permitting a response”). This is not the tone of the “Defenders of the Faith”. And, even in a manifesto, despite wanting to be French at all costs, you have adopted a Germanic tone. I do not need to tell you that if I was familiar with the “Bolshevik” manifesto I would certainly have found it a thousand times worse than yours. But the primary fault of the latter was being a manifesto in the first place. There cannot be anyone who honours France and serves it as well as your works.
Your admirer and friend
Marcel Proust